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Jersey was poorly prepared for the pandemic, and the Government must open up about its mistakes and urgently update its crisis protocols to ensure it is “match-fit” for the next disaster, a security expert has told Express.
According to Brigadier Nigel Hall, who has experience of dealing with crises in the military, UN and NATO, there were “clear deficiencies” in Jersey’s response to covid-19.
But he says the island now has a chance to make crucial improvements to prepare for future catastrophes – and the social and economic fall-out from covid – while lessons are still “fresh”, rather than waiting for the “inevitable inquiry two years down the line.”
The Brigadier, who has previously provided advice to the UK Government, gave a series of recommendations – together entitled ‘Physician Heal Thyself’ – to Government last week.
Pictured: Brigadier Nigel Hall, who has experience of dealing with crises in the military, UN and NATO.
His most critical is that an independent 'red team' review should be conducted as soon as possible on a 'no blame and anonymous basis' to harness lessons from medics, policymakers, and Ministers.
“The Chief Minister needs to come up and be honest about if he was giving advice to his successor, what he’d do differently,” he said.
He also says it is crucial that administrations realise ‘business as usual’ cannot continue during a crisis and that catastrophes – whether economic, social, environmental, defence or health-related – necessitate an overhaul of usual structures and procedures.
If Jersey’s leaders had realised this, the island could have fared much better during the pandemic, he believes.
Pictured: “The Chief Minister needs to come up and be honest about... what he’d do differently."
Among his ideas for upgrading the island’s ‘crisis machinery of government’ are that the Competent Authority Ministers (the main group of crisis decision-makers) should not only refer to STAC for advice, but have a dedicated group of trusted 'critical friends', with international and strategic expertise.
Brigadier Hall equally argues that politics should be “suspended” and that the Government should consider a ‘war cabinet’, taking in expertise from across the spectrum.
Dedicated “unthinkable thinkers” should also be appointed to 'horizon scan' for the next problem, or worst case scenario, both during a crisis and in normal times, he says.
He went through those recommendations in further depth with Express...
Brigadier Hall’s connection with Jersey stretches back nearly half-a-century, with his parents moving to the island in 1975.
For decades, he was “jerked around the world” as a result of his army career, but always had Jersey, where he eventually relocated in 2006, as his “stable place.”
Spending much of his time away in London operating as a strategic consultant and Senior Visiting Research Fellow at KCL, the Brigadier says he never “intimately” followed or engaged with island affairs, but found himself “increasingly concerned” when the virus struck.
Pictured: 'Business as usual' cannot continue and Government must have a plan to operate differently during an emergency, according to the Brigadier.
“Along with one or two others on the island, we all were aware of Professor Neil Ferguson’s predictions about the worst case and it felt a long time before the Emergencies Council met for the first time. If you asked people what was the plan and where the details were, it wasn’t totally reassuring. The more I talked to people in the know, there were clearly deficiencies.”
He was then “urged to engage” with Jersey’s Government and offer his expertise as someone with years of experience dealing with crises in the military, at the headquarters of the UN and NATO.
Troubled by the “gathering covid storm”, he obliged, but says he was abruptly shooed away - “Everything was in hand, no additional (unsaid, ‘especially independent’) assistance was required.” And that was that.
But last week - around a year down the line, over 3,000 cases and more than 60 covid-linked deaths - he was asked for his view by a Minister, and offered a blunt analysis of Jersey’s situation in return:
While many regard the roll-out of the vaccine programme as the 'light at the end of the tunnel', Brigadier Hall believes now is not the time to breathe a sigh of relief, but to get planning for our next inevitable crisis, while the lessons of this one are fresh. Economic and social crises are likely to result from the current pandemic, climate change is a key threat and, just last week, scientists were predicting a new ‘Disease X’ could be around the corner.
Of course, every crisis will need its own bespoke response - but the one thing that should underpin each and every one, according to Brigadier Hall, is a ‘robust crisis machinery of government’ - something he doesn’t believe Jersey currently has.
In other words, do we have the right leaders with the right expertise on tap to make decisions? What is the chain of command? Are there pre-established support structures with links to the community? And, while everyone is working on fixing the crisis, who is keeping an eye out for the next disaster?
“If this is a 'once in 100 years' emergency…this is really big. Have we therefore commensurately taken the same unprecedented transformation of our ways and means of thinking and decision-making and government processes? Or have we just said to everyone, ‘paddle a lot harder, the light’s round the corner’ – but each time we get round the corner we see it’s another corner?”
Unfortunately, Brigadier Hall says, Jersey’s approach appears to have been the latter.
Good crisis management should begin before the crisis, with an up-to-date, robust ‘risk register’ - a key list of every disaster that could happen and instructions setting out how to deal with it.
As the covid-19 virus picked up pace in Jersey last year and authorities scrambled to secure enough PPE to replenish rapidly depleting stocks, Express revealed that a pandemic had been top of Jersey’s threat chart - so why wasn’t the island better prepared?
Pictured: A pandemic (number 35) was ranked the most likely catastrophic event on the Government's Risk Register.
It’s hard to say, but Brigadier Hall notes that risk readiness is often viewed as a 'tick box' exercise for which only a minimum of preparation is required, rather than being deemed a genuine possibility; or indeed probability.
Even when risk planning is done to a high level - such as with the Pandemic Planning Emergency Exercise in November 2019, which centred around a flu scenario - a lack of specific crisis expertise among those at the top may be a hindrance.
Evoking the Maginot Line as he discussed Jersey’s “one-dimensional” approach, he explained: “The whole defensive plan in France against Germany was this powerful line of fortification; but, lo and behold, the Germans broke through it and everyone was then stunned in front of the headlights and the Germans continued on through. The same situation with coronavirus – ‘Oops, this is not a flu pandemic. This is a different one and with different requirements and different needs and different timescales.’”
He later added: “When Jersey…went right the way through the pandemic drill, did the Minister of Health or anyone in authority, did any of the senior medics question the fact that Jersey quite understandably follows PHE [Public Health England], but did anyone ask, ‘What if PHE’s assumptions are wrong?’ Was no one saying how would Singapore, or this other country, or Germany, what would be different in those countries?” Brigadier Hall explained.
Pictured: Jersey's pandemic planning was based around a flu scenario, which assumed that the elderly would be less at risk - the opposite of covid.
“It’s incredibly difficult if you’re a Minister, a layman, to turn around and say, ‘I’m not sure you’re right.’ How often does that happen? Did the Health Minister, when everyone ticked the box and said, ‘We’ve done the pandemic exercise’, did he do any interrogation of the assumptions and the exercise’s aims and accomplishments?
“Because we all know, when it came to the crisis, we didn’t have the arrangements between the hospital and the primary care, we didn’t have all the resources in place, and there are some people who say, for instance, that we are and would be badly caught out if we had the worst case coronavirus scenario, where you needed the full beds staffed in the Nightingale Hospital.”
For Brigadier Hall, the experience highlights just why the Government should have separate brains to consider these issues - “unthinkable thinkers”, as he terms them.
These individuals would not only be tasked with planning for crises, but also, when the crisis is in full flow, thinking about the next worst thing that could happen.
“[Jersey] needs a group of people confirming what the issues are, horizon scanning the whole time…It’s the person tapping the Chief Minister on the shoulder saying, ‘Your eyes are on that, but actually you need to be looking this way.’”
Pictured: Brigadier Hall says some have suggested the island would not be able to staff the Nightingale Ward.
He continues: “Busy people such as [the Health Minister] can’t be running the future worst-case. Big government departments are stuffed full of policymakers and administrators - there are very few people who have the experience of what it’s like in a crisis, and one of the things is, however bad something gets, I immediately say, ‘What’s next going to hit me round the head?’
“That’s why we need the 'Unthinkable Thinking Cell'. I’d like to think if we had, we would be in a better shape. I’m sure we would.”
As well as referring to STAC, the Government could also benefit from putting together a group of 'critical friends' to be on call for emergencies to provide strategic advice.
“I still today ask, have we got the brains, the ideas and best processes? Have we mobilised all the talent to deal with this 'once in 100 years' crisis?... It’s not hugely expensive or difficult – there could be an outer network on Zoom of 10 trusted people, their advisers, their mentors.”
The membership for this emergency panel needn’t be prescriptive, but Brigadier Hall argues that, broadly speaking, it should be “diverse” with expertise spanning both economic and social contexts, including a "contrarian thinker" and, perhaps, an “elder statesman."
As an example of the latter in the UK, he points to former Prime Minister Tony Blair, who was one of the first public figures to call for the first doses of covid-19 vaccine to be prioritised, and increase the period of time before the second jab to ensure that as many members of the population as possible gain increased protection.
Pictured: Tony Blair is a good example of the type of "critical friend" the Government could benefit from. (Wiki/World Travel & Tourism Council)
Emergencies also call for cancellation of ‘politics’, he says.
“It’s a no-brainer that if this is an unprecedented crisis, the biggest thing since World War Two, over 60 people have died and the economic impact is enormous, to me politics as normal must be suspended for the months required to put the most efficient effective united response together.”
In the UK, this would involve bringing Keir Starmer into Government.
Adopting this ‘war cabinet’-style approach would enable greater “teamwork” and sharing of ideas. Indeed, had such an approach been taken, politicians may not have felt that the only way to get ideas to be considered by Ministers was by forcing a States Assembly debate.
This was the case for Deputy Jess Perchard, who brought forward a vote on an elimination strategy, and Deputy Inna Gardiner, who called new arrivals to have to self-isolate before the result of their first PCR test.
The Brigadier says he has seen first-hand the success of such diverse and cross-political teamwork through his own think-tank, New Bletchley.
Pictured: Deputy Jess Perchard, who brought proposals for elimination to the States Assembly, and also participated in a New Bletchley discussion last year.
In April 2020, he virtually gathered together Deputy Perchard, founding member of sustainable supermarket SCOOP India Hamilton, JPRestaurants’ Dominic Jones, then-IoD Chair Charlotte Valeur, former IMF economist and Jersey Finance Chair Gunther Thumann, cyber and IT expert Tim Ross-Gower, chartered accountant Steven Wilderspin, and former Treasury Minister Alan Maclean for a discussion about the pandemic.
Among their conclusions, which included working towards a sustainable economy, a more cohesive society, training and re-skilling, and a refresh of Jersey’s fiscal framework and tax, was that “Government decision-making must become better informed and consulted, and nimbler and more agile.”
“As UK government has started to do, and as Tony Blair recommends, bring in outside experts who are used to operating in extremely challenging situations. Blair strongly commends the appointment of Lord Deighton as UK PPE Tsar, and he says that nine other top work streams require similar temporary crisis leadership reinforcement. Jersey should consider its bespoke variation of the same,” a report on the group’s key findings reads.
In other words, high-ranking civil servants and Ministers should agree to cede control when necessary.
“I’ve got nothing but sympathy and empathy for people who decided to go into politics and never expected to come face-to-face with this pandemic, but nevertheless it happens on their watch and big and bad and ugly stuff has happened and at some stage you say this is where we need different leaders in, temporarily.
“Get them in front of the States so they can [approve] them – you can say, you are temporarily in charge of track and trace or PPE, for example.”
Pictured: Former Treasury Minister Alan Maclean was among those called upon to share his view at the New Bletchley meeting.
He notes: “My experience all over the last decades in different bureaucracies is that people dig into their silos [during a crisis]… and people want to hang on to power, but there comes a time where business as usual will not cope.”
His most critical recommendation, however, is that an independent 'red team' review should be conducted as soon as possible on a 'no blame and anonymous basis' to harness lessons from key insiders now.
If necessary, the Brigadier suggests the document could be “closed” for around 18 months to allow the recommendations to be implemented.
“Any bureaucracy or organisation, if you’re writing to your boss the lessons in a normal traditional way, you’re perhaps going to be less brutally truthful than you would be if you devise a system where an outsider comes in who has the integrity and trust and you are guaranteed anonymity and that there’s no blame. You can then honestly say, 'What are the top priorities? What are the things you would change?'”
It shouldn’t just be medics and civil servants - Ministers should also give their view.
Pictured: A 'red team' review must be conducted urgently to capture the key lessons learnt from the pandemic.
“If you have an utterly defensive bureaucracy – and I’ve seen a lot of them – if you have everyone incredibly inward-looking and defensive, afraid to admit that mistakes have been made, and not prepared to honestly say the batting order of priorities…then we are not going to be match-fit for the future.
“The Chief Minister needs to come up and be honest about if he was giving advice to his successor, what he’d do differently.”
And there’s no time to lose – the review must start now, he argues.
“The world is a much more dangerous place, pathogens are going to cause us more medical issues, we need to up our game. We cannot wait for the inevitable inquiry two years down the line when people are out of post. You’ve got to capture right now the lessons.
“…The number one issue – and I cannot emphasise this enough – is that it’s got to start within weeks or we may pay the price later down the stream.”
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